While reading Kach's thread (about the Pegasus Destroyer) a concern came to mind.

How do we gauge how much time has actually passed In Character before a ship or station or base is actually complete?

The reason I ask is based partly off of my own ships and fighters in my RnDs, while the frigate and cruisers will take a few months (espically the new corvette, which must be handled with care - which mean's it'll take six months to create DESPITE it's small size)

Where as the fighters will take just a few days.

Do we gauge time based on the amount of RP posts actually made? Or do we gauge time based on actual time (IE - Out of Character, or reality) or do we go about some other way?

Please answer this because right now, I'm rather confused on how this is handled here on TRF :(

How do we gauge how much time has actually passed In Character before a ship or station or base is actually complete?


We don't, because we don't bean count or meter tally. How much time has passed In Character depends, in my approximation of things, entirely on how much time you have written into your stories. Keep in mind that Rule #1 always applies and in cases where things get out of hand remember; someone is always watching.

EDIT: What Beff said, but I'll leave in what I said anyway.



My understanding is that it depends how you RP it out. Naturally you can't be like "Bam 10 years just passed and now I have 1000 Star Destroyers", but you can mention that a few months have passed between a couple different RPs (even if say 1 week has only passed OOCly). Time is very roughly sketched out, allowing each player to say as much or as little time has passed as they need (within reason). This allows RPs to be running at different times ICly, though at the same time OOCly (so you can take as long or as short a time as you need to do you're RP). Then when we do mass TRF Timeline updates we say where we think it would all fit in in relation to each other's RPs (and this doesn't necessarily mean when a thread was started OOCly in comparison to another thread or when one ended in comparison to another one).

On the note of the TRF Timeline, if you'd like your stuff included, hop over to the TRF Timeline thread and post when you think it should be. Or if we haven't gotten that far wait for either Dolash or I to do the next mass GC update for it (I think Dolash said he was going to work on that the last time I talked to him).

Yeah, IC time is hard to gauge but we determine it by various factors noted in threads.

For instance, if you are talking about building a big ship, the main question I ask is "How long the group doing the building has been around?" (both OOC and IC).

Because XYZ group suddenly appears at TRF doesn't mean the planet, people, government, etc.. just appeared out of nowhere. IC, they had to come from somewhere so I usually like to think of XYZ group as simply insular and not yet on the galactic scene...more self reliant. Not with the resources to build a large fleet. Small planetary defenses, ok. But of course, even that depends on what your roleplay with regards to group before it's "coming out of the closet" on TRF. For instance, if you roleplayed that the planet just came out of a civil war and one party won and wanted to push the group into a galactic community (or interact on a galactic level with their neighbors), then they probably would not have concentrated too much on planetary defenses as they were fighting each other for political superiority.


Other factors would be the size of the ship, sophistication of the ship, etc..


What I see sometimes is people making R&D's and then roleplaying the R&D but this in itself does not constitute he owns then IC. A person can R&D (and roleplay) 20 ships and only have one planet. It wouldn't make sense that they have the resources to support said fleet. Then they go on a planet grabbing spree and assume that when they have completed a second or third takeover, their fleet automatically expands. Unfortunately, the planets taken are taken in the "present". The big ships take time to build. We let people fudge a little because there really is no rule other than common sense.

What really helps is if the group/person actually roleplayed character stories that tells what's going on with their faction. A "filler" story that adds credibility to the claims made for fleeting. If you try to rely on simply R&D and planet grabs and try to fight in the present, I think you'll be hardpressed. People like to rp that everything runs smoothly, ship production, droid production, etc.. and nothing runs smoothly.

So what helps iron out the kinks is how long your group has been around at TRF... so even if stuff doesn't go smoothly, you're around long enough to find those missing shipments of durasteel that went to a planet on the other side of the galaxy.. :b